The poor precision of neutrino--nucleus scattering data has become a driving component of the systematic error budgets of new long-baseline oscillation experiments. By building an active detector designed to make use of the high-intensity neutrino beams developed for oscillation experiments, higher precision studies of neutrino scattering processes can be undertaken. MINER\nu A, a compact, fully-active detector has been proposed to employ the NuMI beam at Fermilab, and will be able to dramatically improve the statistical precision of measured scattering cross-sections. It will also be instrumented to study, in detail, the effects of the nuclear medium on neutrino physics processes.

PACS numbers: 14.60.Lm, 24.80.+y, 25.30.Pt, 29.40.Gx